Cheap Maps, Spatial Politics, and England’s Early Modern Colonies
Katarzyna Lecky, Surtz Associate Professor of English, Loyola University, Chicago
My paper will engage with the seventeenth-century explosion of cheap print pocket maps printed in England: affordable, broadly accessible cartographic materials owned, used, and dreamt with by the mass of ordinary people often forgotten by the grand sweep of history, who carried them as travel aids as they worked to better their financial circumstances. Domestic English pocket maps first came to the market in 1590 and targeted an expansive public sphere that included the marginally literate. These cartographic affordances also rose to prominence over a century characterized by the nation’s rapid colonial expansion. I offer case studies of the first miniature maps depicting England’s early American colonies, which offered up the economic resources of its new territories to broad audiences invested in upward mobility and personal wealth. At a time when cheap print seminally redefined the knowledge of what was common to the colonial commonwealth, small-format cartography mapped the rhizomatic growth of an everyday empire grounded in commercial concerns and seeded with private interests, even as drama, poetry, and prose took up this spatial imaginary to celebrate the cornucopianism at the core of this populist geography
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Register and Request PaperAbout the Map History Seminar
The Map History Seminar aims to support interdisciplinary research in the history of maps and mapping in any period or specialty. With scholars in many different fields, we hope to foster lively discussions and explore new and exciting scholarship that engages with the history of maps and mapping. The seminar uses a workshop model where attendees will read a pre-circulated paper from the presenter and attend ready to discuss. Some meetings will be virtual and some in person.